In today's competitive environment, many organizations adopt various strategies to effectively communicate with their clients or customers. Often, the success of an organization with a diverse employee base and/or a large customer base depends on how effective the communication is both within and outside the organization. Much of the business world relies on communication between individuals who are geographically apart, making organization and participation in in-person meetings both time-consuming and expensive. Organizations utilize various modes of communication including paper communication, telephone communication, e-mails, and various other web-based communications. While paper communications, such as postal communications, are time consuming, telephone communications lack the benefit of having tangible records of such communications.
Consequently, e-mail communication has rapidly become one of the most widely accepted modes of communication by the business community. E-mail communication provides a near-instantaneous delivery of information at little cost and conveniently disposes of transmission delays traditionally imposed by geographical constraints. In addition, e-mails can also be used to simultaneously communicate with a large number of users by the draft of a single message sent to multiple users at the same time.
The low cost and ease of e-mail communication encourages unnecessary or irresponsible messaging. Another problem is that an e-mail spammer may easily send thousands of e-mail messages to random recipients. The ease of e-mail communication may result in a deluge of messages in a user's in-box. Often, the sheer volume of e-mails may impede or delay the recipient's ability to respond. Consequently, the sender of an e-mail does not know when to expect a response.
Currently, some e-mail systems enable a sender to receive a receipt notification or auto-response when their message has been opened. However, these systems operate only upon the opening of the e-mail by the recipient and do not alert the e-mail sender of the status of the e-mail if the e-mail is not opened. Such systems do not provide the e-mail sender with any estimate of the response time from the recipient of their e-mail.
Several factors influence a recipient's ability to respond to a received e-mail. For example, if there are too many unread messages in the recipient's mailbox, it might take the recipient longer to respond to a particular message. Similarly, the location of a sender's e-mail in the queue within the recipient's mailbox may also affect the response time. As one would expect, these factors are constantly changing. Mere reliance on the time a recipient took to respond to the sender's prior e-mail may not be a sufficient estimate of e-mail response time to a subsequent e-mail.
Thus, a need exists in the art for a way to provide an e-mail sender with a dynamic estimate of a recipient's response time that accounts for multiple factors to create a more accurate response time estimate.